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Locked on 04/13/2007 1:17:11 PM PDT by Religion Moderator, reason:
Childish behavior |
Posted on 04/03/2007 2:32:00 AM PDT by NYer
ROME, APRIL 2, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Adolf Hitler's No. 1 enemy was the Vatican's secretary of state, Eugenio Pacelli, future Pope Pius XII, according to documents recently found in Europe.
In an article published last Thursday by La Repubblica, reporter Marco Ansaldo announced that he has a dossier on Pius XII that complements documentation found in the Vatican Archives.
According to the newly discovered documents, Pius XII was considered an enemy of the Third Reich. Memos and letters unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at the Pope's efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews.
One document from the head of Berlin's police force tells Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Third Reich's foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews "both in terms of people and financially."
Russia's motives
In a commentary on the new documents, Sister Margherita Marchione, author and expert on Pius XII, explains the campaign against the Pope was the work of the Soviets.
"Russia's plans were to control Europe after the war. The only outspoken obstacle to Russia's plan in Europe was the Catholic Church," Sister Marchione wrote.
"The first attacks claiming that the Church had endorsed silently the atrocities of the Nazis came from Communist Russia," she explained. "Soon to control Poland, and other vast areas in Eastern Europe, Russia saw the need to break the loyalty to the Pope of Catholic majorities in those countries.
"The plan was a simple one: convince everyone that the Pope supported the hated Nazis during the war and, therefore, neither he nor the Church could be trusted after the war. The destruction of the Church would leave the field wide open for Russian influence and control."
Plenty of Protestants defend that action.
A reception for Hindenburg in 1939 would have been a grisly affair, what with five years of decomposition.
Your whole argument now boils down to “oh, yeah?”
Of course not.
But your entire argument is to believe a discredited author in the face of all other evidence...all motivated from hatred of the Roman Catholic Church.
You keep repeating this same lie.
One of Cornwell's points in the book that is fully consistent with German history is that the strength of the Catholic Churches in Germany was their decentralized local control at the grass roots level --- until Pacelli began signing concordats in the 1920s between the governments and the Vatican, centralizing power in the hands of the magisterium at the expense of the local churches and local Catholics.
Power was taken by these concordats from local Catholic churches and organizations and given to the magisterial Vatican. The Vatican's victory in these concordats was at the expense of the local Catholics as well as others.
Cornwell is hardly an objective source. He is a disaffected Catholic or ex-Catholic who hates the Church.
There is NO consensus among historians and scholars that Pius XII assisted the Nazis in ANY way. Many scholars believe the opposite. And I am not referring to Marchione here. Moreover, primary sources, people writing at the time of the Second World War uniformly praised Pius XII for his efforts to help the Jews.
Where are your primary sources?
If you go back and read the thread, you will find out that your statement is untrue.
There is NO consensus among historians and scholars that Pius XII assisted the Nazis in ANY way.
That statement is also untrue. The concordats were his babies. He conceived them and he hatched them and the 1933 Concordat helped Hitler immensely. Both Hitler and the Vatican considered that Concordat victories for themselves --- but local Catholics in Germany saw it as a defeat for themselves and history proved it to be so.
Moreover, primary sources, people writing at the time of the Second World War uniformly praised Pius XII for his efforts to help the Jews.
Baloney. Some sources --- yes. And he did things to help some Jews but not other Jews. He was inconsistent and ambivalent.
And what about the half million Serbs being slaughtered in his own backyard. Did he receive any praise for his efforts to save the Serbs from the hands of the Catholic Ustashe of Croatia? Did he receive praise for his help in bringing to justice the mass murderers of the Third Reich? Nooooo.
Did he receive praise for giving a cardinal's hat to the spiritual leader of the mass murdering Ustashe after the war? Did he receive praise for those notorious Ratlines running through his Vatican that enabled countless Ustashe and Nazi war criminals, many of whom were clergy, to escape from post-war justice? He did receive praise from Adolph Eichman for helping him to escape through those Ratlines through the Vatican.
Saving a few Jews from Auschwitz may have been his penance for his 1933 Concordat, but it did not absolve him from the rest, nor immunize him from rewarding the likes of Franz von Papen and Aloysius Stepinac and others after the war.
Where are your primary sources?
Where are your primary sources that can tell us all those things that he did to help the Serbs, to stop the Catholic Ustashe, and put an end to those Ratlines running through the Vatican?
This question was raised from the aspect of the internal politics, but was ignored.
It has also been pointed out how Protestant churches also cooperated with the Nazi's. IOW, the blood is on everyone's hands. If they are willing to look at their failures in the hopes of not letting them be repeated.
Words mean things and I believe you owe me an apology Campion. I never said lie. If you take the time to read the posts you will find that I raised the question does this "defend at all costs" attitude originate with the Jesuits or predate them?
The critical aspect of all three books is that authors identifying themselves as Catholic wrote them, and all have a different agenda in mind than merely condemning Pope Pius XII. One can quickly determine that Pius and the Holocaust, even in Cornwell’s account, are only tools for the unifying premise that underlies all three books: that the papacy itself is the primary target, both in general, and specifically the papacy of Pope John Paul II. All three books use Pius XII, and exploit the Holocaust, as a means to make points in an internal Catholic debate over papal primacy – meaning the extent of papal juridical authority within the Church – and papal infallibility. While Cornwell’s focus is narrower that both Wills and Carroll, to see any of these books as a serious investigation into Catholic-Jewish relations, and how the Church under Pius responded to the Holocaust, is to misunderstand their purpose.
Thanks, Frannk, for this short, explicit post that connects the dots.
http://www.catholicleague.org/research/papacy_under_attack.htm
This explains REALLY what is going on. It is no less than an attack on the Papacy by proxies who are said to be “Catholic.” The Catholic League saw right through this and a large number of articles and tracts are available on their website archives written by good historians who expose the trash. I like to boil it down to the “bottom line,” mother!
Enjoy that morning coffee and think of us chatting together!
;-o)
F
This is pure fabrication. One reason we know it is fabrication is that the leaders of the local churches, the Bishops of Germany, were in unanimous agreement with the concordat.
I did not buy it. It was a library book. I was not about to enrich the liar.
This statement is pure fabrication. One reason we know it is a fabrication is that so many of the Catholics of the CCP were greatly upset when they were told that the Enabling Act had to be approved first and their party dissolved before Hitler would sign the Concordat of 1933.
No, it is not fabrication. The German Bishops were in unanimous support. Look it up. That does not mean they were happy about having to do the concordat, but neither was Pacelli. They were in a very difficult position, and did what they thought best.
Back in Rome, Pacelli tells the British ambassador: "I had to choose between an agreement and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich." He says a pistol had been held to his head, and that he felt he was negotiating "with the devil himself."
You have nothing but a second hand quote from a magazine writer and, of course, "reviews" from rabid anti-Cornwell sites on which you base your "facts".
I'm afraid you have shown yourself to be something less than credible.
And yet these same CCP members who were being terrorized were not intimidated and were willing to fight for the survival of the Weimar Republic. These people deserve our respect, not the leadership that sold them out. They wanted to stand and fight. They knew what the future would be if they did not. And they were right.
They had to approve the Enabling Act and then disband the CCP. I'm sure that the bishops were delighted with the Concordat, but were the local Catholics who lost their power to influence the government delighted with the price they had to pay to get it?
The leadership did not "sell them out". Where do you get this garbage? Priests had already been arrested by the Nazis and Catholic Publications were already being shutdown. And that was before the concordat. The writing was on the wall. The Church was being persecuted and the Catholic Centre Party was already in severe decline and not going to exist for long. The only way to protect the right of Catholics to worship in Germany was to negotiate, which is exactly what the Protestant majority had already done.
You persist in this silly fantasy that the Catholic Centre Party was going to defeat Hitler and that the concordat is what brought Hitler to power. It is nothing but a fantasy and has no truth to it. Hitler's government was already in power, had already signed agreements with the Protestants, and had signed the Four-Power act which was an international treaty with Britain, France, and Italy. BEFORE the concordat. Hitler was already in power. Get it? Why do you persist in these fantasies? Why do people so wish that the Catholic Church was the cause of the Holocaust?
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